The Drawing of the Three (29 page)

The gunslinger looked at him, smiling. “I’m going to turn in,” he said. “Be—”

“—on my guard. Yeah. I will.”

Screaming was next.

Eddie fell asleep the moment his head touched the bunched bundle of his shirt, and it seemed only five minutes later when Detta began screaming.

He was awake at once, ready for anything, some King Lobster arisen from the deep to take revenge for its slain children or a horror down from the hills. It
seemed
he was awake at once, anyway, but the gunslinger was already on his feet, a gun in his left hand.

When she saw they were both awake, Detta promptly quit screaming.

“Jes thought I’d see if you boys on yo toes,” she said. “Might be woofs. Looks likely enough country for ’em. Wanted to make sho if I saw me a woof creepin up, I could get you on yo feet in time.” But there was no fear in her eyes; they glinted with mean amusement.

“Christ,” Eddie said groggily. The moon was up but barely risen; they had been asleep less than two hours.

The gunslinger holstered his gun.

“Don’t do it again,” he said to the Lady in the wheelchair.

“What
you
goan do if
I
do? Rape me?”

“If we were going to rape you, you would be one well-raped woman by now,” the gunslinger said evenly. “Don’t do it again.”

He lay down again, pulling his blanket over him.

Christ, dear Christ,
Eddie thought,
what a mess this is, what a fucking . . .
and that was as far as the thought went before trailing off into exhausted sleep again and then she was splintering the air with fresh shrieks, shrieking like a firebell, and Eddie was up again, his body flaming with adrenaline, hands clenched, and then she was laughing, her voice hoarse and raspy.

Eddie glanced up and saw the moon had advanced less than ten degrees since she had awakened them the first time.

She means to keep on doing it,
he thought wearily.
She means to stay awake and watch us, and when she’s sure we’re getting down into deep sleep, that place where you recharge, she’s going to open her mouth and start bellowing again. She’ll do it and do it and do it until she doesn’t have any voice left to bellow
with.

Her laughter stopped abruptly. Roland was advancing on her, a dark shape in the moonlight.

“You jes stay away from me, graymeat,” Detta said, but there was a quiver of nerves in her voice. “You ain’t goan do nothing to me.”

Roland stood before her and for a moment Eddie was sure, completely sure, that the gunslinger had reached the end of his patience and would simply swat her like a fly. Instead, astoundingly, he dropped to one knee before her like a suitor about to propose marriage.

“Listen,” he said, and Eddie could scarcely credit the silky quality of Roland’s voice. He could see much the same deep surprise
on Detta’s face, only there fear was joined to it. “Listen to me, Odetta.”

“Who you callin
O
-Detta? Dat ain my name.”

“Shut up, bitch,” the gunslinger said in a growl, and then, reverting to that same silken voice: “If you hear me, and if you can control her at all—”

“Why you talkin at me dat way? Why you talkin like you was talkin to somebody else? You quit dat honky jive! You jes quit it now, you hear me?”

“—keep her shut up. I can gag her, but I don’t want to do that. A hard gag is a dangerous business. People choke.”

“YOU QUIT IT YOU HONKY BULLSHIT VOODOO MAHFAH!”

“Odetta.” His voice was a whisper, like the onset of rain.

She fell silent, staring at him with huge eyes. Eddie had never in his life seen such hate and fear combined in human eyes.

“I don’t think this bitch would care if she
did
die on a hard gag. She wants to die, but maybe even more, she wants
you
to die. But you
haven’t
died, not so far, and I don’t think Detta is brand-new in your life. She feels too at home in you, so maybe you can hear what I’m saying, and maybe you can keep some control over her even if you can’t come out yet.

“Don’t let her wake us up a third time, Odetta.

“I don’t want to gag her.

“But if I have to, I will.”

He got up, left without looking back, rolled himself into his blanket again, and promptly fell asleep.

She was still staring at him, eyes wide, nostrils flaring.

“Honky voodoo bullshit,” she whispered.

Eddie lay down, but this time it was a long time before sleep came to claim him, in spite of his deep tiredness. He would come to the brink, anticipate her screams, and snap back.

Three hours or so later, with the moon now going the other way, he finally dropped off.

Detta did no more screaming that night, either because Roland
had frightened her, or because she wanted to conserve her voice for future alarums and excursions, or—possibly, just possibly—because Odetta had heard and had exercised the control the gunslinger had asked of her.

Eddie slept at last but awoke sodden and unrefreshed. He looked toward the chair, hoping against hope that it would be Odetta, please God let it be Odetta this morning—

“Mawnin, whitebread,” Detta said, and grinned her sharklike grin at him. “Thought you was goan sleep till noon. You cain’t be doin nuthin like
dat,
kin you? We got to bus us some miles here, ain’t dat d’fac of d’matter? Sho! An I think
you
the one goan have to do most of de bustin, cause dat other fella, one with de voodoo eyes, he lookin mo peaky all de time, I declare he do! Yes! I doan think he goan be eatin
anythin
much longer, not even dat fancy smoked meat you whitebread boys keep fo when you done joikin on each other one’s little bitty white candles. So let’s go, whitebread! Detta doan want to be d’one keepin you.”

Her lids and her voice both dropped a little; her eyes peeked at him slyly from their corners.

“Not f’um startin out, leastways.”

Dis goan be a day you ’member, whitebread,
those sly eyes promised.
Dis goan be a day you ’member for a long, long time.

Sho.

They made three miles that day, maybe a shade under. Detta’s chair upset twice. Once she did it herself, working her fingers slowly and unobtrusively over to that handbrake again and yanking it. The second time Eddie did with no help at all, shoving too hard in one of those goddamned sand traps. That was near the end of the day, and he simply panicked, thinking he just
wasn’t
going to be able to get her out this time, just
wasn’t.
So he gave that one last titanic heave with his
quivering arms, and of course it had been much too hard, and over she had gone, like Humpty-Dumpty falling off his wall, and he and Roland had to labor to get her upright again. They finished the job just in time. The rope under her breasts was now pulled taut across her windpipe. The gunslinger’s efficient running slipknot was choking her to death. Her face had gone a funny blue color, she was on the verge of losing consciousness, but still she went on wheezing her nasty laughter.

Let her be, why don’t you?
Eddie nearly said as Roland bent quickly forward to loosen the knot.
Let her choke! I don’t know if she wants to do herself like you said, but I know she wants to do US . . . so let her go!

Then he remembered Odetta (although their encounter had been so brief and seemed so long ago that memory was growing dim) and moved forward to help.

The gunslinger pushed him impatiently away with one hand. “Only room for one.”

When the rope was loosened and the Lady gasping harshly for breath (which she expelled in gusts of her angry laughter), he turned and looked at Eddie critically. “I think we ought to stop for the night.”

“A little further.” He was almost pleading. “I can go a little further.”

“Sho! He be one strong buck He be good fo choppin one mo row cotton and he
still
have enough lef’ to give yo little bitty white candle one
fine
suckin-on t’night.”

She still wouldn’t eat, and her face was becoming all stark lines and angles. Her eyes glittered in deepening sockets.

Roland gave her no notice at all, only studied Eddie closely. At last he nodded. “A little way. Not far, but a little way.”

Twenty minutes later Eddie called it quits himself. His arms felt like Jell-O.

They sat in the shadows of the rocks, listening to the gulls, watching the tide come in, waiting for the sun to go down and the lobstrosities to come out and begin their cumbersome cross-examinations.

Roland told Eddie in a voice too low for Detta to hear that he thought they were out of live shells. Eddie’s mouth tightened down a little but that was all. Roland was pleased.

“So you’ll have to brain one of them yourself,” Roland said. “I’m too weak to handle a rock big enough to do the job . . . and still be sure.”

Eddie was now the one to do the studying.

He had no liking for what he saw.

The gunslinger waved his scrutiny away.

“Never mind,” he said. “Never mind, Eddie. What is,
is.
”

“Ka,”
Eddie said.

The gunslinger nodded and smiled faintly.
“Ka.”

“Kaka,” Eddie said, and they looked at each other, and both laughed. Roland looked startled and perhaps even a little afraid of the rusty sound emerging from his mouth. His laughter did not last long. When it had stopped he looked distant and melancholy.

“Dat laffin mean you fine’ly managed to joik each other off?” Detta cried over at them in her hoarse, failing voice. “When you goan get down to de pokin? Dat’s what I want to see! Dat pokin!”

Eddie made the kill.

Detta refused to eat, as before. Eddie ate half a piece so she could see, then offered her the other half.

“Nossuh!” she said, eyes sparking at him. “No
SUH!
You done put de poison in t’other end. One you trine to give me.”

Without saying anything, Eddie took the rest of the piece, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed.

“Doan mean a thing,” Detta said sulkily. “Leave me alone, graymeat.”

Eddie wouldn’t.

He brought her another piece.

“
You
tear it in half. Give me whichever you want. I’ll eat it, then you eat the rest.”

“Ain’t fallin fo none o yo honky tricks, Mist’ Chahlie. Git away f’um me is what I said, and git away f’um me is what I meant.”

She did not scream in the night . . . but she was still there the next morning.

That day they made only two miles, although Detta made no effort to upset her chair; Eddie thought she might be growing too weak for acts of attempted sabotage. Or perhaps she had seen there was really no need for them. Three fatal factors were drawing inexorably together: Eddie’s weariness, the terrain, which after endless days of endless days of sameness, was finally beginning to change, and Roland’s deteriorating condition.

There were fewer sandtraps, but that was cold comfort. The ground was becoming grainier, more and more like cheap and unprofitable soil and less and less like sand (in places bunches of weeds grew, looking almost ashamed to be there), and there were so many large rocks now jutting from this odd combination of sand and soil that Eddie found himself detouring around them as he had previously tried to detour the Lady’s chair around the sandtraps. And soon enough, he saw, there would be no beach left at all. The hills, brown and cheerless things, were drawing steadily closer. Eddie could see the ravines which curled between them, looking like chops made by an awkward giant wielding a blunt cleaver. That night, before falling asleep, he heard what sounded like a very large cat squalling far up in one of them.

The beach had seemed endless, but he was coming to realize it had an end after all. Somewhere up ahead, those hills were simply going to squeeze it out of existence. The eroded hills would march down to the sea and then into it, where they might become first a cape or peninsula of sorts, and then a series of archipelagoes.

That worried him, but Roland’s condition worried him more.

This time the gunslinger seemed not so much to be burning as
fading,
losing himself, becoming transparent.

The red lines had appeared again, marching relentlessly up the underside of his right arm toward the elbow.

For the last two days Eddie had looked constantly ahead, squinting into the distance, hoping to see the door, the door, the magic door. For the last two days he had waited for Odetta to reappear.

Neither had appeared.

Before falling asleep that night two terrible thoughts came to him, like some joke with a double punchline:

What if there was no door?

What if Odetta Holmes was dead?

“Rise and shine, mahfah!” Detta screeched him out of unconsciousness. “I think it jes be you and me now, honeychile. Think yo frien done finally passed on. I think yo frien be pokin the devil down in hell.”

Eddie looked at the rolled huddled shape of Roland and for one terrible moment he thought the bitch was right. Then the gunslinger stirred, moaned furrily, and pawed himself into a sitting position.